


The Fallen Made to Shine

by rei_c



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-24
Updated: 2005-07-24
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rei_c/pseuds/rei_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being the younger twin isn't easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fallen Made to Shine

In our family, we never spoke of the gods by name. Those of the light, those in paradise, we called the Shining Ones; all the rest were carefully avoided. Our most sacred Shining One, the one we prayed to twice a day and left presents of rice candy for in the temple, took the form of a Griffin in his third incarnation. When my sister was Sorted into the House of Lions, with a Griffin as mascot, my family was thrilled. She had always been the Shining One of the Patils, and this was only more proof my family didn’t need. Parvati, my sister, my twin, had always been the bright one. I was the one carefully avoided. 

I was younger by seconds, not minutes, and came out of my mother’s womb like Jacob, grasping my sister’s heel. She was born with hair like my father; I was born with a tiny, bald, cone-shaped head, born crying when she was silent. For all that we were born identical, my family could always tell us apart. They dressed her in gold and crimson saris, her straight hair swinging around delicate gold jewellery that had been in our family for generations. I was the second daughter, unwanted and unneeded, and if I hadn’t been gangly and awkward, I would have worn Parvati’s seconds. Instead, I wore our servant’s clothes, dark blues and greens, my hair plaited up and out of the way, practical. 

But it was more than just clothing. Parvati shone, in our family’s garden, holding court underneath the wet heat of a Bangalore sun, effortlessly charming, laughing, beautiful, glowing. I was nothing, sitting inside my father’s office, feet dangling off a chair with a book on my lap that weighed more than me, pale, hiding in candlelight. She had a hundred marriage proposals by the time we moved to London; I, three. 

She wilted over the summer before we started school. England was wet and hot, but not in the same ways as Bangalore and the people expected more than she could give them. But me, oh, the English loved me. They called me intelligent, wise beyond my years, as they patted my head and smoothed down my hair. Used to a life of dimness and isolation, I was what they had been trying to achieve in the colonies for centuries, the perfect imperial subject, educated and pliant, capable of being raised by their careful guidance and helping hands to the top echelons of society. I took my sister along with me, because I could, because I wanted to show her more than anyone that I, too, could be a Shining Patil, that I, too, could be desired. That summer, Parvati grew to hate me and I learnt what it was to despair. 

The Hat was placed on my head, and I could feel it rifling through my memories. It was a sensation I felt like remembered, like when my father’s associates in the Ministry would come over and search me with their eyes, finding something in me that earned their cold approval. They didn’t like Parvati; people like Draco’s father, Theo’s father, Pansy’s father sneered at her while they touched me on the shoulder and murmured stories of a Shining One who was forced from heaven and was going to take back paradise by force. The Hat whispered of Slytherin, told me that if I wanted things to continue as they were, me rising, my sister falling, then that was where I needed to be. It felt something I couldn’t name at the suggestion, told me that in another lifetime I be free to find my home among the snakes, but for now, for her sake, it would place me in Ravenclaw. 

It took minutes to for the Hat to place me, but Parvati won the House of the Shining Ones as her own in ten seconds, and as she walked past me, sitting among the Soaring Ones, she didn’t even look at me. 

In a House of Shining Ones, she became even more bright, friends with the stars of our generation, and I couldn’t see how I was rising and she falling when everyone knew her name and I spent hours alone in the library. People called me by her name, and the only thing that Soared in me was hopelessness and desperate need. 

It happened slowly, over the years, but I grew closer and closer to the Cunning Ones, saw that the Hat was right. In the next lifetime, that would be my House and I would fit there as I didn’t quite yet, though my anger and hatred was beginning to grow as cold as theirs. In the meantime, I did what was expected of the Shining One’s twin, sister. I followed her example and joined the group led by the Shining Ones, outwardly agreed, became quietly indispensable to certain people. I said the right things, did the right things, became the right person, and then when the Fallen One made his movement, I, too, Fell. 

The people around me were different from that summer before school, Professor Snape, Bellatrix, Alecto, but the stories were the same, the praise the same. I took comfort in their words, mentors who had been shoved in corners and forced to watch others take what was rightfully theirs. All I wanted as a child was affection; all I wanted as an adult was revenge. 

I met the Shining Patil on a field one day, in the middle of Oxfordshire. She had tears in her eyes, held out her hand to me and begged for me to come back. I, the Fallen Patil, stood across from her, the Shining Patil, and took her birthright, her sanity, her life. Bellatrix stood behind me and watched my sister, my twin, writhe in the mud, scream, die, and then I fell to my knees with the force of a ruptured twin bond, the double force of a twin bond destroyed from within the bond, clutching my own head and screaming. She calmed me, took me away and laid me on a bed, touched my hand, shoulder, forehead, and told me she was proud of me. 

Days passed and I slept, the weight of my sister’s birthright settling in my mind and on my shoulders. She had been gifted with a little of the Sight and the ability to charm, and when I woke with the taste of sustenance and restorative potions on my tongue, so had I. 

Within weeks, I stood with Bellatrix behind our Fallen Lord, with the other elite, in front of our soldiers, under the protection of those my family had always avoided naming. The Shining Ones were across from us, covered by the gods of the Sun, and as mortals did battle that day, so did the deities in heaven. Both sides fought for possession of paradise, they to keep it, us to wrest it from their control and remake it in our likeness. 

I walked off the field that day with my friends, my lovers, my Lord, my gods. My thirst for vengeance had been quenched by the blood covering me, the gift-price to the Fallen Ones paid in the blood of my enemies, the entrance to paradise coated in crimson and dripping. Paradise was ours, and we were the new Shining Ones. I went home and named all of the gods I’d followed to the rivers of paradise. I set up altars and sacrifices, and intoned their names, one by one, for the first time in my life.

And then I stood up and went to kill my parents. Bellatrix went with me. When we came back to England, I was the only Patil alive, and I was free. 

I Shone.


End file.
